Services

We understand that your research may have unique needs. Our engineers, product developers and network of manufacturing partners are at your disposal for timely, competent, and confidential development of custom products to meet your specific needs.

BEAMLINE GUIDE
ESRF MASSIF-1

MASSIF-1 is a world leading unique facility for the high throughput, fully automatic characterisation and data collection of macromolecular crystals. The new service is not designed to replace user visits to the synchrotron, but rather to do the hard work of screening crystals or collecting routine data sets through the night, freeing researchers to spend more time on challenging data collection problems and study of the underlying biology.

MASSIF-1 has a highly intense beam (3 × 1012 ph/sec) with a size of 100 μm x 65 μm (H × V FWHM) at a fixed energy of 12.835 keV (0.966 Å). Apertures can be used to define a beam between 100 and 10 μm in diameter. The beamline is optimised for fully automatic data collection and sample evaluation with a new robotic system (RoboDiff) and high capacity dewar (240 spine pins). New automated services use mesh scans to fully evaluate crystals and centre the optimal volume to the beam, this position is then characterised and data collected, or not, depending on user request and parameters defined in the diffraction plan in ISPyB. No restrictions are placed on samples, loop size or crystal quality. As this is a fully automatic high throughput service samples must be registerd in the ISPyB data base with sample names and puck barcodes. 1 ESRF Beamline MASSIF-1 (n.d.). Retrieved September 18, 2017 from http://www.esrf.eu/home/UsersAndScience/Experiments/MX/About_our_beamlines/id30a-1–massif-1/o.html

Automated Systems at MASSIF-1:

Workflows have been developed that allow the full characterisation and data collection from a large number of crystals with no user intervention. Multiple crystals are selected in MXCuBE which takes care of the mounting / optical centring / unmounting of each sample. MASSIF-1 uses and Passerelle-EDM worflow engine. This workflow first uses a mesh scan and a line scan to centre the best part of the crystal to the X-ray beam.2 MASSIF-1 automated crystal evaluation and data collection services. April 8, 2016, from http://www.esrf.eu/MXPressE